BASIC PLANT BREEDING

In this video, HTG Supply’s Dr. Myers goes over the easiest ways to breed your plants. He touches on how to pollinate two plants that have your most sought after features.He also mentions how some plants are male, some are female, and some are both. Check this video out for some cool plant science and learn the first steps to breeding in under 5 minutes.

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Transcription:

In this video I want to talk to you about how to make seeds which is the very beginning of plant breeding. Now, plant breeding is kind of an advanced topic and so I’m going to have a second video called advanced plant breeding where I talk about some specific techniques, but in this video we’ll talk about how to make seeds and how to choose the best plants to make seeds with. Hopefully growing up you had to talk with your parents about the birds and the bees and in fact some plants are boys and some are girls, but in the plant world many plants have both boy and girl parts in their flowers. So the first thing I want to do is let’s look at a little video and learn to identify the parts of the flower that are boy versus the parts that are girls.

Many flowers have both male and female parts. The male parts of this flower these little yellow things here this is where the pollen comes from a little bits of pollen are going to come off of there that is called the anther. Now the stem that connects the ants they’re back here the base is called the filament and the filament and the anther together is called the stamen. That’s the boy part of the flower. Now the girl part of the flower starts off here with this little white thing, this white tip here at the end is called the stigma. This is where pollen is going to go and enter the plant the stem or the little tube attaches the stigma to the base is called the style. Now in this plant you can’t quite see back down in there but there is a little round structure called an ovary and inside that is an obvious where the seeds going to be now. Amaryllis evolved in South Africa and it is pollinated by carpenter bees or moths so what’s going to happen is a bee or mom is going to go in here and if it has been to an amaryllis before it’s going to have this white or sorry yellow pollen on it and the pollen is going to go and be attached here at the stigma and then the pollen is going to be able to work its way down with style into the ovary where the seeds form. You can see that since the female part is OUTFRONT here this plant is not going to be able to have babies with itself. Most of the time this will encourage pollen from another plant to get deposited here. The bee or the moth will go up here get some sugar when it comes out it’ll get some more pollen on it and if it goes to another amaryllis then this pollen will end up on the stigma of another amaryllis and this is how this plant reproduces.

This is what’s called a perfect flower because it has both male and female parts on it. Once you can identify the male and the female parts of the flower whether on the same plant or different you can then create your own seeds. You’re simply going to take the pollen from the male part and put that onto the female part. Now some tools use for this some people like to use tweezers and they will pluck off the male part, they will touch that to the female part. Other people will get a paintbrush and they will dab the paintbrush onto the male part to get the pollen and then put that on the female part. If you’re growing plants like this that have very small flowers you might want to invest in magnifying lens so you can see what you’re doing.

Now you don’t want to just pick random plants you want to improve your plants, so pick the two plants that have the absolute best qualities. If you in really big plants pick the two biggest plants and mate them. If you’re growing indoors you want small plants so they fit in a gross space, pick the two smallest plants and only allow them to grow. If you want purple flowers orange flowers a certain flavor or certain taste whatever trait you want your plants make sure that that trait is in the parents this will then increase the chances of that trait will be in the offspring. Now you’re not exactly like your mom or your dad you’re a mixture of the two and so plant breeding get a little technical because by mixing the genes of two different organisms many of the offspring won’t be exactly like your parents, so I will make a video look for it on advanced plant breeding and this will help you to increase the traits that you want in the offspring but for now to get started you mix the male parts with the female parts to create seeds and pick the two plants that have the traits that you really want to only allow them to make. Don’t let any of the mediocre or less than good plants reproduce. Only good plants could have the traits that you want> I hope this helps you create seeds and start a breeding program. good growing

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